Sitting at my computer eight hours a day banging out email after email explaining technical issues to customers running Internet services, I realize that one of my main roles as a system administrator is to be a writer. It might not be poetry or prose, but it involves an effort to be clear, concise and communicate with a specific audience using written language. When I look back at the road which brought me to this role of technical support writer, it is the machines which I have used to practice writing on I think about most.
Writing machines have always fascinated me beginning with my grandmothers typewriter. My grandparents converted the carport which ran along the side of their house into and extra room which my grandmother used as her study. She was interested in politics, history and travel, and in this pursuit, built up a home library of approximately one thousand books, not to mention stacks upon stacks of National Geographic magazines dating back to the early nineteen hundreds. Over the years I did extensively peruse the books and magazines in her collection, but these were more a part of the background. The typewriter was the focal point of my grandmother’s study for me. It was a modern electric typewriter which had a feature many others did not. In addition to the black ink ribbon, it also included a red ribbon, which you could switch to in order to make edits and mark corrections. Practicing the craft of editing was not exactly on my agenda as a young adolescent, rather I learned that you could make pictures using the character set, and use the red ink to accentuate the drawings with colorful highlights. I would type out formations of various letter combinations to create jet airplanes with trailing red exhaust, or my favorite subject; Godzilla with red flames escaping his toothy maw.
Time went on and video games and the other occupations of adolescent life replaced that early interest in using the typewriter. It was not until preparing to enter college that I received a gift of a word processor from my mother. Sure, it had a clip-art library and could print out fancy borders, but where was the red ribbon? Despite the monochrome printing, there were many interesting features to learn and use. Significantly a small screen enabled you to edit and manipulate text before printing. After many hours of fiddling and consulting the manual, I became quite proficient writing with this machine. I learned it was possible to create macros with this device, speeding up those repetitive tasks. Supposedly, I was using this device for my school work, but by this time I had discovered modernism, post modernism, surrealism and many other great artistic movements. With plenty of inspiration, writing seemed like the most likely creative outlet for me. Scribbling in notebooks was a normal activity for me, but sometimes I could not interpret my own scrawl. I depended on the word processor to begin practicing the art of writing.
Fondly remembering those early doodles with my grandmother’s typewriter, and the pleasure I derived from the books and magazines that surrounded me growing up, my creative output began to take the form of small self published magazines, which we called “zines”. Through friends and bookshops, I found a network of people who also enjoyed this activity, and we shared and traded our work. By this time computers were all the rage, and here I was plodding along with an ancient word processor. Soon a PC was taking up most of the space on my small desk. To my surprise I found the programs confusing and could not work with them as efficiently as my old word processor-a-saurus. The computer revolution was not for me I thought, and I wanted some desk space back. My first PC found its way to the dumpster.
Paper, along with my word processor, had become obsolete. That is what I thought to myself upon discovering the Internet. Once again a faster and better computer was taking up space on my desk. I struggled to become familiar with how it operated, but eventually I discovered a simple text editor that behaved similar to the word processor I had become so familiar with. I was finally able to let go of the old writing machine, and learn how to make websites instead of zines with this next mode of machine based writing. Now some fifteen years later, still using the same text editor on an almost daily basis, I find myself helping other people to publish their creativity on-line. A path that began with an early fascination for my grandmothers typewriter.
